It had been a long couple of nights in the county jail, and Jimin hadn't had a shower in as many days. She smelt distinctly like floor and BO, and she couldn't help but feel sorry for her father, having to sit across from her on the ride home. It had been a long journey back to the house, and Siwon hadn't said a word to Jimin the whole way home. They'd spent the whole trip in stony silence, her father gripping the steering wheel so tight his knuckles were turning white. Jimin had spent the time with her forehead pressed against the window, staring out outside. Her expression hadn't changed since Siwon had picked her up that morning.
When they got in the house, Siwon exploded.
"What were you thinking?" he said, drawing himself to full height, and Jimin was painfully reminded of all those times her father had been called into school. "No, actually, don't even answer that, there's nothing you could say that could make this make sense."
Jimin gave him an answer anyway. "I was going after Minjeong."
"So, you ran through security?"
"It was my Love, Actually moment," Jimin mumbled, feebly. At the incredulous look on her father's face, Jimin lifted her chin, and squared her shoulders. "Mum said I should."
As if by magic, Tiffany appeared out of nowhere, her arms folded, her back against the door frame. Her mouth was pressed into a stern, thin, line. "I told you should go after her, not to jump security in airport," she said. "I thought you had common sense, Jimin."
"You said I should fight for her," Jimin said.
"Not at the expense of the law, come on."
Jimin sighed, her last hope of her mother defending her gone. She shuffled past her father, head hung, towards the stairs.
"Where do you think you're going?" her father growled.
"To bed."
"Oh, no you don't," Siwon said, grabbing Jimin by the arm and pulling her into the living room, closing the door behind them. They heard a sigh, and footsteps as Siwon walked elsewhere.
Siwon turned on her. "What did you do, Jimin? Why did Minjeong want to leave so badly?"
"I just messed up, alright?"
Her father frowned. "She was on the verge of tears when I took her to the airport, I think you did more than mess up."
The guilt pierced Jimin's gut like a knife. "Thanks for the sympathy," she muttered.
It was the wrong thing to say. Siwon's expression - which had already been stormy - became thunderous.
"You think this a joke?" Siwon bellowed, and Jimin shrunk back. "You think it's funny that we had to bail you out of jail? Do you have any idea how this looks for us?"
The anger Jimin had been swallowing bubbled to the surface, loud, unwelcome and burning in her chest. "Because everything is about how it looks for you, isn't it?" she spat.
"Excuse me?"
"Extravagant reunions, over-the-top weddings. Everything just to say look-at-us, look at how perfect we are," Jimin said, her tongue like fire against her teeth.
"You can't speak to me like this, Jimin, just because your girlfriend-"
"-Minjeong isn't my girlfriend."
Jiyoung arched an eyebrow. "Well, that much is clear."
"No, I mean Minjeong was never my girlfriend," Jimin snapped. "We were faking it."
"You were what?"
"Didn't you wonder why I never mentioned her before the reunion?" she said.
Siwon mouth dropped open, her eyes wide. "Why would you-"
"Because I didn't want to mess with your image," Jimin said. "Because Mum looked so happy when I said that I was bringing someone, and because for once, I didn't want to be the disappointment."
"You're not-"
"Don't say that I'm not," Jimin snapped. "Don't say that when you look at me like I'm a mistake."
Siwon took a step back, for once, shocked into silence.
Once Jimin had started, she found it hard to stop. "I can never meet your expectations, not a single one. Ever since you look at me like I'm a huge disappointment. And you drag everyone else into it too. Why d'you think Minjeong left? If you hadn't made such a big deal about us coming here - ordering tickets behind our backs without telling us, like it was some big favour, maybe she'd have stuck around. And you know why? It is exhausting being a part of the Kim family and it is suffocating being your daughter."
She was yelling by the time she'd finished her speech, and as her last sentence rang out and the room turned to silence, Jimin's heart sank as regret filled her stomach.
The silence continued, as Siwon's expression shifted from hurt to anger, her eyes turning to dark pools, hands rounded into fists.
Jimin's face softened. "Dad, I-"
"No," Siwon said, his voice dangerous. Jimin closed her mouth. "You do not get to speak right now. I will admit that at times me and your mother have been a little overbearing. If you feel that we've not been supportive enough of you, well, that's your opinion. But do not-" she took a step towards her and Jimin shrunk back- "do not blame us for what happened with Minjeong. From the moment you introduced us to her, we have done nothing but be welcoming, because you told us that she was someone you cared about a lot. You're not a teenager anymore, it's time to stop blaming your parents for your problems and own up to your own mistakes. We didn't drive Minjeong away. You did."
Her father turned on his heel and marched out of the room, slamming the door behind him, leaving Jimin alone in the silence.
**
Minjeong's flat felt horribly small and empty in comparison to Jimin's childhood home. It was exactly as she had left it - clothes all over the floor, kitchen a mess. She had to pinch her fingers over her nose when she opened the fridge, assaulted with the putrid smell of all the rotting food she should have thrown way before she'd left. Of all the talk she'd given Jimin about being a responsible adult, packing for yourself and calling your mother so she wouldn't worry, clearly she wasn't much better. That was a bitter thought, and she slammed the fridge closed, stomping off to look elsewhere.
She scrabbled her way through cupboard after cupboard, but there wasn't any sign of anything edible, not even in the drawer she always kept stocked with chocolate bars and biscuits for emergencies. Everything was empty, and she cursed herself for not thinking about this before. She closed the drawer and let out a shout, covering her hands over her face and kicking the cabinet.
After a moment of sitting still on her kitchen stool, leg bouncing up and down with restless energy, she snatched her keys up from where she'd left them on the counter top, storming outside, slamming the door behind her.
She hadn't given much thought to where she was going, but as she turned the corner, her eyes found a destination, and for a moment, she stood outside, wondering if she should go in. Then she gave a sigh, and marched through the door.
The bar looked the same as it always had - grubby and dingy, the counter top sticky and the stools horribly rickety. She slid onto a seat in front of the bar. The bartender blinked at her, and Minjeong inwardly screamed when she realised it was someone she recognised, and instantly regretted her decision to come in here instead of any other nondescript bar in the city where she could be fully anonymous. The shame of what she'd done - leaving her job to run off with a girl - still burned hot under her skin. Perhaps that was why she had come here; it was her punishment for the way she'd acted.
"Minjeong?" the woman behind the bar said, her voice rising in pitch. "What are you doing here? I thought you-"
"I didn't come here to work," Minjeong said, irritably. "I came here to drink."
"I can help you with that," she said. "What do you want?"
"Just give me whatever, I don't care," Minjeong mumbled. She sighed, rubbing her hands across her face and inwardly laughed bitterly at the irony of what she was about to say. "I've done something stupid, Chae."
Her cousin, Chaewon, who worked with Jimin during the week and bar-tended for extra cash on certain days, was one of the last people she wanted to see. It had been great once upon a time - the nights when she and Chaewon both worked were the most fun. She was a fun person to be around. She found trouble like no one else did, and she always made serving shitty, drunk customers much more fun.
But now, Minjeong didn't want to look her in the eye. Chaewon and Jimin had always been thick as thieves, and after everything that had happened, the last thing she wanted to do was be around people that reminded her of Jimin.
Chaewon regarded her with narrowed eyes, sliding a drink across the table towards her. Minjeong took it and downed it. It burned as it went down, but Minjeong didn't care. She pushed the glass back across the bar.
"More."
Chaewon frowned, but she took the glass from her and filled it up again. "Look, Jeongie, I get off in ten minutes. Do you want to go back to mine and talk about it?"
Minjeong felt her throat close up. "Just as long as you're not going to ask me to be your fake girlfriend," she said, giving a fake laugh as her voice wobbled.
Then she burst into tears.
**
Jimin lay face down on her bed, her head pressed firmly into the pillow, guilt eating away at her like nothing else.
She'd done a splendid job of messing everything up, and ruining every single relationship she cared about. The atmosphere in the Yu household was tense; Siwon had been completely blanking Jimin. He left the room when she entered, barely spoke at meals, and did everything he could to avoid her. Jimin didn't blame him - the way she'd spoken to her father was unforgivable. She'd driven a wrench into the relationship she had with her father, just as the hole between them was starting to mend. Was there no end to her stupidity?
Jax was curled up next to ber, as usual utterly aware of her owner's mental state, and barked gently. Jimin couldn't even bring herself to scratch the little dog behind the ears, like she always did.
After a few moments, there was a creak as her door opened.
"Go away," Jimin mumbled.
The door opened further.
"Now, really," the voice of Tiffany said, "is that any way to talk to your mother?"
Jimin sighed, and mumbled an apology into her pillow.
The bed shifted downwards, and there was an indignant bark from Jax as she was turfed off the bed onto the floor, and Tiffany took a seat next to her. She put a hand on her shoulder.
"Are you alright, dear?"
"I'm fine," she said, an obvious lie. She turned over onto her back and sat up. "You're not angry with me?"
Tiffany pressed her lips together. "I think there are enough people angry with you at the moment."
"Dad's furious," Jimin said, quietly. "He's not going to forgive me."
"I'm sure he will."
"He won't," she said, and her voice cracked. "He must hate me now."
Tiffany tilted her head and frowned. "You know that's not true."
"You didn't hear the things I said to him," Jimin said.
"Jimin," Tiffany said, her voice becoming somewhat stern. "There's nothing that you could say to make your father hate you. You're too important to him for that. He might be a stubborn as mule - you both are - but he'll forgive you eventually. You know that."
Jimin pursed his lips, but said nothing.
"Look, there's something else I wanted to ask," Tiffany said with a sigh, carding a hand through her hair. "I know you think you missed your chance to make things right with Minjeong, but if you really think that you need to go back home and fix things with her, well, I could get you on the next flight out there."
Jimin blinked, and sat up. "Really?"
"Yes."
"But the wedding's in two days."
"Yes, it is."
"You'd be willing to let me miss the wedding so that I can go and talk to Minjeong?"
Tiffany sighed, and laid down on Jimin's bed, her fingers drumming up and down on her stomach. Jimin waited.
"I want you to be happy," she said, finally. "And that girl makes you really, really happy. If this is what you want, then I'm happy to do it."
"It's not what I want," Jimin said.
"It isn't?"
"No," she said, with conviction. "I would never miss your wedding. You've been waiting so long to do it, I'm not going to ruin it by not being there." Her voice wobbled. "I've been a terrible daughter."
Tiffany looked at her for a moment, her eyes glossing over. She pulled her into a hug. "You're not terrible," she whispered into her hair. "You're wonderful."
"I'm not," Jimin said, her voice cracking, "but I'm trying to be better."
**
"I thought it wouldn't matter," Minjeong mumbled, holding the bottle in front of her face. Her legs were pressed into her chest, her back leaning against Chaewon's sofa. "I thought we'd hold hands for a little bit, make her parents happy and then go home. I didn't know it was going to turn into a month long special. Her mum just looked so happy and she looked so relieved when I said I'd do it."
Chaewon nods, crossing her legs and listening intently.
"And kept going on and on about how it wouldn't be for long and how we'd go back to being friends again," Minjeong said, taking a gulp of her drink. "But she didn't seem to be making any plans about when to tell her parents we had broken up, and her mum was talking about weddings and her dad was acting like I was already part of the family, and it all just got so messed up."
"God, Jimin's an idiot," Chaewon's muttered.
Minjeong blinked at her. Chaewon had been oddly quiet while Minjeong has been explaining it all. She usually had something to say about everything, but until now, she'd kept her mouth shut, and quiet contemplation crossing her face while she'd been listening.
"We've been placing bets at work for years about you two," Chaewon explained, gesturing with her hands as she spoke. "In the office and at the bar. Maybe she just hasn't realised, but she looks at you like you hung the universe. Every time she came in that bloody bar, or you came to visit her in the office, we were all waiting for the moment she'd say something."
Minjeong sighed. Then she groaned, and her face crumpled into her hands. "Oh God, work."
"Look, if it's any consolation, the bar's probably going to close down anyway," Chaewon said, putting a hand on Minjeong's shoulder. "It's not been making enough money and the boss has been looking for an excuse to get rid of people. It wasn't all to do with you."
"Still," Minjeong muttered, thumping her head back against the sofa. "What am I supposed to do for money? How am I going to pay rent? What kind of idiot must I be to think that jetting off to some island with my fake-girlfriend was a good idea?"
She choked then, a half laugh, a half sob.
Chaewon wrapped an arm around her in one of her rare moments of affection, and Minjeong tilted her head to rest it on her shoulder.
"You're going to be okay," Chaewon's said, rubbing Minjeong's arm. "You know how I know that?"
"How?"
"Because you're Kim Minjeong," Chaewon said, a smile quirking at her lips. "And if I know you like I do, then I know you're going to wake up tomorrow and find a way to fix it. Because you don't give up, not for anyone."
Minjeong raised her bottle, miserably. "I'm okay to fall apart tonight, though, right?"
Chaewon's face softened. "Just for tonight."
**
Chaewon bit her lip.
Minjeong was asleep on her sofa, having finally passed out after all that she'd drunk, and she was curled up onto one side, hair tossed all over the place like a tangled blonde waterfall.
It made Chaewon's heart hurt.
They'd been born the same year. Their mothers were sisters, and the two of them had shouldered together their way through pregnancy until they'd both brought two girls into the world; two girls that were everything alike and nothing alike at all at the same time. Chaewon had always been the erratic one. She'd been messy. She was the one that dealt badly with emotional pain, that covered things up with a smile while self-destructing in every manner she could see fit. Minjeong was the one that kept it together. Minjeong met every problem head on and always came out on top, neat, put together and every bit the adult that Chaewon had never managed to be. Even after the incident with Minjeong's mother - Chaewon's aunt - at the church, Minjeong had kept herself together.
There had been too many times to count when Chaewon had been the one passed out on the sofa, while her cousin had looked after her in the way only her cousin could. Now that the roles were reversed, Chaewon didn't know what to do.
As the time ticked by, she found Minjeong a blanket and tucked it over her body, before picking up her phone from the counter and heading out into the night air, taking a blanket and sitting cross-legged on the pavement outside of her flat. She looked down at Minjeong's phone, entering in the lock number that her cousin hadn't changed in years, and found Jimin's phone number in the contacts.
Her eyes flickered back towards the door and then back down at the phone. Minjeong would kill her for this. She knew she shouldn't do it.
She pressed Jimin's number anyway.
It rang for a half a second before she heard Jimin's voice on the other side.
"Jeongie?"
She sounded so hopeful, Chaewon felt a little bit of guilt creep into her gut for what she was about to say to one of her best friends.
"Wrong Yu," she said, and was surprised at how steely her voice sounded.
"Oh," she said, and Chaewon could hear the deflate in her voice even across the phone. "Is she okay? Why do you have her phone? Where is she?"
"She's fine. She's sleeping," she said. "Jimin, what the fuck did you do?"
There was an edge to her voice, her tone that she rarely used, and by the pause on the other end of the phone, Jimin had heard it too. She heard her sigh and it crackled through the phone. "Chae, I messed up."
"Oh yeah, you bet you did," Chaewon said. "I told you this wasn't going to go well. I told you not to do anything stupid."
"I know," Jimin said, and Chaewon felt her free hand twist into a fist a little.
Even though she was hundreds of miles away, she could see in her mind's eye the sorrowful face that she was making at that moment, and it made her blood boil.
"So, what are you going to do about it?" she said, it was only halfway through the sentence that she realized her teeth were clenched.
"I don't know," Jimin said, in that pitiful voice she hated so much. "I'm only going to make this worse. I tried to go after again, Chaewon, I swear. I went to the airport. I tried to stop her getting on the plane."
Chaewon's voice was flat. "Why did she get on the plane, then?"
"I didn't get there in time. The plane had left by the time I'd got to the gate."
"Should've been quicker, then," Chaewon said, coldly.
"I know."
She'd had enough of this. Whatever she'd been trying to achieve by ringing her hadn't worked, and instead she'd found the anger hot in the back of her throat, the vision of her strong, wonderful, beautiful cousin, passed out on the sofa, hurt and broken inside, strong in her mind, and she found the part of her brain that stopped her from saying stupid things had had enough.
"Jimin," she said, her voice sharp. "I've had enough of this pathetic act of yours. You really, really hurt my cousin-" she heard Jimin suck in her breath on the other end of her phone- "and no one hurts my cousin like that. If you truly want to fix this, if you really want her to forgive you, get off your ass and do something about it. Otherwise - leave her the hell alone."
She ended the call, guilt burning in her stomach, bile rising in her throat. She hadn't wanted to say that to Jimin. She was her friend, and she'd always been a good one. She never wanted to upset Jimin, but the way she'd treated her cousin, one of her most favourite people in the world, had made her impossibly angry. She'd apologise for it later when she finally came back to work, but for now, she'd let it stew.
She let out a huff, her breath catching on the night air. It may have been summer, but that didn't mean that it was a warm night. She wrapped the blanket she'd brought out around herself, and drummed her legs up and down on the floor. The guilt was still hot in her stomach, not just for what she'd done to Jimin, but how it might have affect Minjeong. Goddamn it. Why was she having to learn over and over again to think before she acted?
She bit her lip, looking down at her phone. There was one more person she needed to call.
**
Jimin stared at her phone, Chaewon's brash voice still lingering in the air after she'd finished the call. The pit in her stomach was only getting bigger. She'd never heard Chaewon sound so cold. It wasn't that she was usually all that nice to her - Chaewon teased, and berated and scoffed - but her voice had been like ice.
It seemed that there was no end to the list of people that Jimin was pissing off.
It was late, and her mind kept wandering to whatever was happening over on the mainland that had caused Chaewon to call her so angry. She'd said that Minjeong was fine, but Jimin couldn't help the fog of thoughts that told her something was wrong. The pit in her stomach grew bigger and bigger.
Her room was lit by the dim light of her laptop, the slightly blue light making her eyes ache. She had that same blank word document open, the words: A Speech About Love written at the top and underlined. Underneath that, the cursor blinked in and out, mockingly.
She'd been sitting there for a while. She'd been painfully aware of how close the wedding was, and in all the commotion, she'd forgotten about the stupid speech she was supposed to write. It was a painful bitter irony that she had to sit there and write about love when she'd never had it or understood it.
How could she write about the heart when her own heart was breaking?
But Jimin couldn't - and would not - let her parents down. Not after the way she'd been treating them. She hadn't spoken to her father in a while. The last time Jimin had seen him, Siwon's eyes had slid over her and pressed his lips together. It was clear that there was nothing her father had to say to her. It stung.
Jimin's eyes were drooping, her head threatening to slump down onto the keyboard. She wanted nothing more than to go and sink down into her bed and shroud herself in blankets, but she'd promised herself that she'd get at least a sentence of this speech done before she let herself go to sleep.
No matter how hard she tried, her thoughts kept floating back to Minjeong, and after a while she sighed, typing one sentence, and then slamming her laptop lid shut.
A Speech About Love
I want my best friend back.